The history of concrete runs more than 2,000 years, from Roman builders mixing lime with volcanic ash to the reinforced towers and decorative floors poured today. The big turning points are Roman concrete (about 300 BC to AD 476), Joseph Aspdin’s Portland cement patent in 1824, the arrival of steel-reinforced concrete in the second half of the 1800s, and the 20th-century additives, ready-mix trucks, and coatings that made concrete the most used building material in the world. The timeline above walks through the dates. The sections below explain what changed at each step and why it still matters to anyone who pours, coats, or repairs concrete.
What concrete is made of
Concrete has three basic ingredients: water, aggregate (sand, gravel, or crushed stone), and cement. Cement is the gray powder that acts as the glue. When it meets water, a chemical reaction called hydration starts. The cement paste coats the aggregate, hardens around it, and keeps gaining strength for weeks. The reaction gives off heat, which is why a large pour feels warm.
People often use “cement” and “concrete” as if they mean the same thing. They don’t. According to the Portland Cement Association, cement makes up only about 10 to 15 percent of a typical concrete mix by volume. The rest is aggregate, water, and air.
Concrete before the Romans
Natural cement deposits
The oldest cement-like material on earth formed without people. In what is now Israel, geologists in the 1960s and 1970s studied deposits where oil shale burned next to limestone beds long before recorded history. The heat produced natural cement compounds.
Nabataean cisterns
Nabataean traders, who controlled the desert trade routes in what is now Jordan and southern Israel, built underground cisterns lined with lime-based mortar to store water. Their builders learned that a dry, well-tamped mix held up better than a wet one, a lesson every concrete finisher still learns on the job. Several of their sites, including Avdat and Petra, still stand.
Egypt, Greece, and Assyria
Around 3000 BC, Egyptian builders used gypsum and lime mortars. The Great Pyramid at Giza used a large volume of mortar as a bedding layer for its casing stones, which let masons set those stones with very tight joints. Mortar and concrete are different materials, but they rely on the same idea of a mineral binder that hardens.
German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann found floors made of lime and pebbles in the royal palace at Tiryns, Greece, dated to roughly 1400 to 1200 BC. Lime mortars were in use in Greece, Crete, and Cyprus by about 800 BC. The Assyrian Jerwan Aqueduct, built in 688 BC, used a waterproof lime mortar.
China and sticky rice mortar
Chinese builders used lime mortars in walls, pagodas, and tombs, including sections of the Great Wall. In 2010, researchers reported in an American Chemical Society journal that a key ingredient in some of that mortar was sticky rice. The rice starch made the lime mortar stronger and more water resistant, and some of those structures have held up for centuries.
Roman concrete
The Romans used concrete on a large scale from about 300 BC to AD 476. Their mix, called opus caementicium, combined lime, volcanic ash called pozzolana, water, and chunks of stone or broken brick. The volcanic ash reacted with the lime and let the concrete set even underwater, which is why Roman harbors and piers were possible.
Concrete changed Roman architecture. Builders could shape arches, vaults, and domes that would have been hard or impossible in cut stone. Historians call this period the Roman architectural revolution.
Roman concrete and modern concrete differ in two ways that matter:
- How it was placed. Romans packed the mortar and stone into place by hand, layer by layer. Modern concrete is mixed fluid and poured into forms.
- Reinforcement. Roman concrete had no steel inside it. It held up well under compression but was weak when pulled or bent. Modern reinforced concrete uses steel to carry those tension loads.
Why Roman concrete lasted so long
Many Roman structures still stand after 2,000 years, and researchers keep finding reasons. A 2017 study led by geologist Marie Jackson found that seawater reacting with the volcanic ash in Roman harbor concrete grew new mineral crystals over time, which made the material tougher. A 2023 MIT study found small lumps of lime in Roman concrete that can dissolve and refill cracks when water gets in. Modern researchers are studying both ideas for longer-lasting concrete today.
The Pantheon
The Pantheon in Rome, finished around AD 126, has a dome about 142 feet across. It is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Its builders used heavy aggregate low in the walls and light pumice near the top of the dome to cut weight, and the walls get thinner as they rise. Recesses built into the supporting walls also lightened the structure and gave cracks a place to form without threatening the dome.
Roman trade guilds
Part of Rome’s success came from training. Each trade had a guild that passed knowledge of materials, tools, and methods to apprentices. The legions also learned construction and engineering so they could build roads, bridges, and forts wherever they went. The same idea holds today: good concrete work depends on people who were taught the right way to do it.
The lost centuries
After the Western Roman Empire fell, the know-how for lime and pozzolana concrete faded across Europe. Builders went back to stone, brick, and timber for most of the Middle Ages. Interest in hydraulic lime and cement slowly returned from the 1300s onward, and by the late 1600s engineers were again using lime-based mortars and concrete on large public works such as the Canal du Midi in France.
Smeaton, Aspdin, and Portland cement
Modern concrete starts with a lighthouse. Between 1756 and 1759, British engineer John Smeaton built the third Eddystone Lighthouse off the coast of Devon, England. He tested limes and found that lime made from limestone containing clay set hard under water. That discovery of hydraulic lime pointed the way to modern cement. Smeaton’s Tower was later moved to Plymouth, where it still stands.
In 1824, Joseph Aspdin, a bricklayer from Leeds, England, patented a method for making what he called Portland cement. He heated finely ground limestone and clay, then ground the result into powder. He chose the name because the hardened product looked like Portland stone, a building stone quarried in England. Later makers, including Aspdin’s son William and Isaac Johnson, burned the mix at higher temperatures and produced a cement much closer to what we use now. Portland cement remains the standard cement in concrete around the world.
Reinforced concrete
Concrete is strong when squeezed and weak when stretched. Adding iron or steel fixed that. In 1848, Joseph-Louis Lambot of France built a small boat out of iron mesh and mortar. In 1867, French gardener Joseph Monier patented iron-reinforced concrete planters and later expanded his patents to pipes, beams, and bridges. Engineers in Europe and the United States soon worked out how to design with reinforced concrete.
A few American milestones followed quickly:
- 1891: George Bartholomew poured the first concrete street in the United States, around the courthouse square in Bellefontaine, Ohio. A section of it is still there, about an hour’s drive from TCP’s home in Lima.
- 1903: The Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, 16 stories tall, became the first reinforced concrete skyscraper.
- 1913: The first ready-mixed concrete was delivered to a job site in Baltimore.
- 1930s: Air-entraining agents came into use. The tiny air bubbles they create give water room to expand when it freezes, which greatly improved concrete’s resistance to freeze-thaw damage.
- 1936: Hoover Dam was completed using about 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete in the dam itself.
Concrete high-rises
After the Ingalls Building, most tall buildings went up in steel. That changed in the 1960s. Bertrand Goldberg’s twin Marina City towers in Chicago, finished in 1964, showed that reinforced concrete could compete for high-rise work. Today the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 2,717 feet, uses a reinforced concrete core.
Decorative concrete history
Concrete stayed plain gray for most of its history. In the early 1900s, craftsmen began mixing metallic oxide pigments into concrete because those pigments hold their color in sunlight. The L. M. Scofield Company, founded in 1915, became one of the first companies to make color products for concrete. Chemical stains, color hardeners, integral color, and sealers followed.
Stamped concrete came next. In the 1950s, Brad Bowman developed tools for pressing patterns into fresh concrete, and in 1970 he founded the Bomanite Corporation to license the process to contractors. Flexible urethane stamps arrived in the late 1970s and made texture work faster and more detailed.
The last few decades brought the biggest change. Contractors now use polymer-modified cement overlays, epoxies, urethanes, and polyaspartics to make plain concrete look like wood, slate, granite, or marble. These are thin systems applied over an existing slab, so a homeowner can change the look of a patio or garage without tearing out concrete. A few examples from TCP’s own lineup:
- Graniflex, a multi-lift flake and quartz broadcast system for garages, patios, pool decks, and commercial floors
- Metallic Marble, an epoxy with metallic pigments that gives a three-dimensional marble look
- Rustic Concrete Wood, an overlay that looks like wood planks
- Stamped overlay and Tuscan Slate for stone and slate textures
You can see the full list on the product systems page.
Polished concrete
Polished concrete took hold in Europe in the early 1990s and reached the United States later that decade. Warehouses and big-box retailers liked it because a ground and densified slab needs no wax and holds up to heavy traffic. Home improvement chains and other large retailers adopted it for new and existing stores, and polished floors are now common in retail, schools, and offices. TCP’s scientific concrete polishing system covers that process.
Concrete today
Concrete is now the most used building material on earth. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, world cement production runs about 4 billion metric tons a year. China alone used more cement in 2011 through 2013 than the United States used in the entire 20th century, a comparison drawn from International Cement Review and USGS figures.
The basic recipe has not changed much since Aspdin. What has changed is how we place it, reinforce it, protect it, and finish it. Sealers and coatings now let a slab last longer and look better than plain concrete ever could.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented concrete?
No single person invented concrete. Ancient builders in the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, and China used lime-based mortars, and the Romans used concrete on a large scale. Joseph Aspdin patented Portland cement in 1824, which is the cement used in modern concrete.
When was concrete first used?
Lime mortars and lime-and-pebble floors go back thousands of years, with Greek examples dated to around 1400 BC. Roman concrete came into wide use around 300 BC.
Why has Roman concrete lasted so long?
Roman builders used volcanic ash that reacts with lime and, in harbor structures, with seawater to form new minerals over time. Researchers have also found lime lumps in Roman concrete that help seal small cracks when water gets in.
What is the difference between cement and concrete?
Cement is the powder that binds the mix. Concrete is the finished material made of cement, water, sand, and gravel or stone. Cement is only about 10 to 15 percent of the mix.
When was reinforced concrete invented?
In the mid-1800s. Joseph-Louis Lambot built an iron-reinforced boat in 1848, and Joseph Monier patented reinforced concrete in 1867 and expanded it to beams and bridges in the following years.
Where was the first concrete street in America?
Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1891. Part of the original pavement is still in place next to the Logan County Courthouse.
Learn to work with decorative concrete
The Romans trained their builders through guilds. TCP does it with hands-on classes at our facility in Lima, Ohio, where contractors work hands-on with Graniflex, Metallic Marble, Rustic Concrete Wood, and Grand Flagstone. See the hands-on epoxy classes, read about decorative concrete training in Lima, Ohio, or book a free consultation to talk about adding coatings to your business.
Sources: Portland Cement Association, “History of Concrete” and “Cement and Concrete Basics”; U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries: Cement; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Cement” and “Concrete”; American Chemical Society (2010) on sticky rice mortar; Jackson et al., American Mineralogist (2017); Seymour et al., Science Advances (2023).